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We'll tear your soul apart....
From the depths of hell comes body horror, an exploration of sexual desire, lust and gratification, and the pleasure pain theory, as hedonistic Frank Cotton solves the Lament Configuration and receives a gruesome demise, only to be accidentally resurrected.
Hellraiser is unlike any other horror movie of its time, not just for its content, but for the risk New World took on a first-time writer-director, based on his own novella rooted in sadomasochism, with no major stars involved in the production.
It was planned for a direct to video release, until executives realised how special and different this movie was... they invested more money, and it birthed not only a new resurrection scene for Frank Cotton, but also a horror icon in Pinhead.
And who knew so much lube and condoms were necessary for horror movie making in the 1980s...
Jesus wept
This episode was originally released on 19th October 2023
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From the Archive
There's no new episode this week, so I thought you might be interested in revisiting this slightly older, but no less brilliant episode. Just bear in mind, this episode is several years old, it may not sound quite as polished as newer episodes, and new information may have come to light in recent years with regards to the making of this movie (please see above for the original date of release)
Shaun of the Dead is remembered now as a genre landmark; the film that made "rom zom com" a real category and launched the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, but its road to the big screen was anything but assured.
Fresh from Spaced; a landmark cult British TV comedy about young people living, working and partying in North London (when that was something young people could afford to do!), Spaced was written by 20-somethings Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson about 20-somethings, directed by 20-something Edgar Wright, and after Season 1 Episode 3 "Art", an idea festered, like a gaping zombie wound, and they were dead set on doing a zombie movie.
Despite the success of Spaced, it would be a difficult sell. Commissioned by Film4, but saved by WT2, Shaun of the Dead paid loving homage to the seminal zombie classics from George A. Romero, and all they wanted was for Romero to see the movie and give it his blessing...
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Waaassssssuuuuupppppppppppppp!!
In July 2000, a $19 million parody film outgrossed most of the slasher movies it was mocking, and in doing so, quietly ended the very genre it fed off. The late-90s teen horror boom, which included Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer had built its appeal on self-aware, meta-textual cleverness, characters who knew the rules of horror movies and still couldn't escape them. Scary Movie took that self-awareness and pushed it past the breaking point, turning Drew Barrymore's iconic Scream cold open into something closer to a Looney Tunes sketch.
This episode traces how Shawn, and Marlon Wayans, along with their brother Keenen Ivory Wayans, took a script originally titled Last Summer I Screamed Because Halloween Fell on Friday the 13th, developed by writing collaborators Buddy Johnson and Phil Beauman as a more traditional slasher spoof, and reworked it into something rowdier, cruder, and more racially and sexually explicit than anything the genre's white-coded parody tradition (like Airplane! and The Naked Gun) had attempted before.
But there was also a rival script, written at the same time, by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, titled Scream if I Know What You Did Last Halloween...
What are you waiting for, huh? What are you waiting for?!
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
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The Empire Strikes Back is often called the best film in the Star Wars saga, and it started with a decision that seems almost unthinkable in retrospect.
George Lucas, creatively burnt out after directing the first film, chose not to direct the sequel at all. Instead he handed the reins to his old USC film professor Irvin Kershner, hired veteran pulp sci-fi writer Leigh Brackett to draft the screenplay, and set about building Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic into more than one-hit studio products.
Brackett's now-legendary first draft featured a very different Yoda, a very different Lando, and a twin sister for Luke that never made it to screen, but Lucas and a young Lawrence Kasdan reshaped the story into the darker, more ambiguous film we know, including the introduction of one of cinema's most famous twists.
The Empire Strikes Back's production is as dramatic a story as anything in the film itself. Lucas bet his own solvency on financing the sequel independently, taking out a loan to keep Fox's creative hands off the project, only to watch the budget balloon during the shoot and the bank pull its financing mid-production.
That gamble very nearly sank the film, but it ultimately paid off in ways that reshaped Lucasfilm's entire business model, particularly around merchandising rights, and ultimately a film that ends in defeat, with its heroes scattered, became the template for how blockbuster sequels are allowed to work.
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
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The original Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) wasn't a huge hit at cinemas. It found its real audience on home video and cable, building into a genuine phenomenon almost after the fact.
That success put New Line in an unusual position for the sequel: expectations had shifted from "will this work" to "this will work and let's make it bigger and crazier". It meant Mike Myers going from playing two roles - Austin and Dr. Evil - to playing three, with Fat Bastard being literally the biggest villain he would ever play. The Academy was so impressed with the makeup for Fat Bastard, that they would nominate the makeup team for an Oscar. Get in my belly, indeed.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me released 11th June 1999, on a $33 million budget and went on to gross $312 million worldwide, outgrossing the entire domestic theatrical lifetime of the original within its opening weekend alone. Very shagadelic, baby.
Rather than ignore the impending Summer 1999 juggernaut that was Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, The Spy Who Shagged Me's marketing team embraced it, with a teaser trailer that insisted fans see Star Wars, and the result made the Austin Powers sequel the must-see comedy of the summer of 1999...
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
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Back to the Future Part II wasn't really supposed to exist as its own film. The original Back to the Future's "TO BE CONTINUED" tag was actually a post-hoc addition for home video, not a plan, after studio head Sid Sheinberg demanded a sequel. The pitch that eventually became two movies went from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, through Spielberg, to Sid Sheinberg, who greenlit the whole thing on the spot.
From the film's vision of the future 2015, to its pre-CGI ingenuity, and a purpose-built motion-control rig called the VistaGlide that let Michael J. Fox play multiple characters in the same unbroken shot, Back to the Future Part II's ingenious visual effects work was good enough to earn it an Oscar nomination.
But we need to talk about George McFly. The character was originally written as dead in the darker alternate-1985 timeline, after negotiations with Crispin Glover fell apart over money and a real creative disagreement about where the character's arc was headed. What happened next was the production used face moulds taken from Glover during the first film to build facial prosthetics for his replacement, Jeffrey Weissman. It led to an infamous lawsuit over the reconstruction of his likeness without consent, that would have ramifications in Hollywood for decades to come...
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
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Great scott! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads, and if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to get the history and legacy of Back to the Future! It's a story of how Romancing the Stone, Coca-Cola's takeover of Columbia and Double Indemnity came together to make Back to the Future a possibility.
Back in the days when Ronald Reagan, the actor! was president and you needed a nuclear reaction to generation 1.21 jigowatts of electricity to power a DeLorean, a young man called Calvin Klein changed the course of his own personal history by going back to 1955, meeting his parents and technically then accidentally dating his own mother; jeopardising his future in the process.
I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it. It’s your density to listen. So, make like a tree, and get outta here.... pop your 1980's headphones on, turn up the volume and listen to this!
This episode was originally published on 4 Apr 2024
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
Theme Music: Verbal Diorama Theme Song
Music by Chloe Enticott - Compositions by Chloe
Lyrics by Chloe Enticott (and me!)
Production by Ellis Powell-Bevan of Ewenique Studio
Thank You to Our Patreon SupportersCurrent Patrons: Simon, Laurel, Derek, Cat, Andy, Mike, Luke, Michael, Scott, Brendan, Ian, Lisa, Sam, Jack, Stuart, Nicholas, Zo, Kev, Danny, Stu, Brett, Xenos, Sean, Ryno, Philip, Adam, Elaine, Aaron and Steve.
Thank you for supporting Verbal Diorama.
Mentioned in this episode:
From the Archive
There's no new episode this week, so I thought you might be interested in revisiting this slightly older, but no less brilliant episode. Just bear in mind, this episode is several years old, it may not sound quite as polished as newer episodes, and new information may have come to light in recent years with regards to the making of this movie (please see above for the original date of release)
Long before Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly had names, they had mugshots. In 1924, Chicago tabloids were consumed by Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two unrelated women tried for murder and both acquitted; largely because all-male juries of the era were reluctant to convict an attractive woman. Covering both trials was Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, whose ironic dispatches later became a satirical play that folded the two cases into one fictional cell block.
Watkins's 1926 play was a hit, and decades later, Gwen Verdon brought the play to her husband, Bob Fosse, who conceived the 1975 stage musical Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville, staging each number as a self-contained old-timey act commenting on the courtroom drama around it.
By the time Miramax greenlit a film version of Chicago, the movie musical had been functionally extinct as a mainstream genre for years. Director Rob Marshall's dual-reality structure: staging musical numbers as Roxie's fantasy of vaudeville stardom rather than characters spontaneously singing in "real" Chicago, was a hedge against the exact audience resistance that had killed the genre in the '80s and '90s.
Chicago's satire targets trial-by-tabloid and fame built on notoriety; themes that land as prescient. But the film's own star wattage, the Miramax marketing juggernaut and the sheer fun of it, arguably succeeds by being the very thing it's satirizing.
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
Theme Music: Verbal Diorama Theme Song
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Thank You to Our Patreon SupportersCurrent Patrons: Simon, Laurel, Derek, Cat, Andy, Mike, Luke, Michael, Scott, Brendan, Ian, Lisa, Sam, Jack, Stuart, Nicholas, Zo, Kev, Danny, Stu, Brett, Xenos, Sean, Ryno, Philip, Adam, Elaine, Aaron and Steve.
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In 2008, Ben Stiller made a war movie about people making a war movie, and in doing so, accidentally made one of the more prescient satires of 21st-century Hollywood ego, method acting, and the studio system's addiction to spectacle.
Tropic Thunder arrived as a big, dumb action-comedy on the surface and a razor-sharp industry roast underneath, skewering everything from Vietnam war epics to blockbuster bloat to the cult of the "serious actor."
Starting life as a Stiller passion project over a decade in development, it was championed by Steven Spielberg, and has an unrivalled mid-2000s ensemble; Stiller, Jack Black, and a nearly unrecognizable Robert Downey Jr., whose performance as a white Australian actor undergoing "pigmentation alteration" surgery to play a Black soldier showcased both his talent and the thin line of satire in Hollywood. It also, ironically, ended up with him getting an Academy Award nomination.
Tropic Thunder brilliantly satirizes Hollywood's ridiculousness, especially the extremes actors go for awards, but it remains controversial. Despite its flaws, Tropic Thunder remains a relevant critique of the film industry and its egos, prompting discussions about depictions of race, disability and the evolution of comedic boundaries in cinema.
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
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In 1994, a former video store clerk turned indie provocateur rearranged the crime film and, in the process, rearranged Hollywood itself.
Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary's take on hardboiled detective novels from pulp magazines in the 1920s and 30s, stemmed from the success of his first feature, Reservoir Dogs. It would lead to him becoming acquainted with Danny DeVito; a man who would encourage Tarantino having final cut privileges, as well as cast approval for an $8.5 million independent movie, featuring extreme violence, drugs, crime, death and revenge.
Pulp Fiction would lead to star turns (and Oscar nominations!) for Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, as well as John Travolta's career resurrection. It would also lead to Harvey Weinstein not getting his way, for once.
Pulp Fiction has become iconic in its soundtrack, its visual language, its use of storytelling, certain scenes are immortalised in cinema, it’s influenced TV, music, literature and ads. It showed us the brutality of life, in a way that was somehow palatable to the masses, and became the template for a new generation of indie imitators.
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Verbal Diorama is hosted, produced, edited, researched, recorded and marketed by me, Em.
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Pulp Fiction is not just a film; it’s a cultural phenomenon that gets the full treatment in this episode! We peel back the layers of Tarantino's storytelling genius, exploring how he masterfully weaves together tales of crime, chaos, and redemption. The podcast dives into the character arcs of Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield, highlighting their philosophical musings on life and choice amidst the madness. But it's not all serious—there's plenty of playful banter about the film's iconic scenes and memorable quotes, all while keeping a light-hearted tone. And don’t forget the soundtrack! We discuss how the eclectic mix of music not only sets the mood but also became a classic in its own right. So grab your $5 milkshake, sit back, and enjoy this fun yet insightful exploration of a film that changed the game forever!
Takeaways:
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